My friend the poet Anthony Madrid was yammering on about Rachel Zucker's new poetry collection, "The Pedestrians." I was skeptical. I hadn't loved the only book of hers I'd read, "Museum of Accidents" (2009). Well, I hadn't finished "Museum of Accidents," to be precise. The name-dropping, the blather, the splat of it all, just hurled onto the page — I found myself mentally editing the poems. But I admired the book, too, its rawness and ingenuity. My response is engineered into the poems; they dare you to turn away. And the lines that are good are really good: "The Chimney Swift flies over daily in summer. / So what? // It's too late to describe the world."

So I picked up Zucker's new book. To someone who knows only "Museum of Accidents," what's most surprising about "The Pedestrians" is its economy. The collection is divided into prose pieces that can recall Anne Carson or Lydia Davis in lyric-essay mode ("Fables") and poems that recall Rachel Zucker in mentally edited mode ("The Pedestrians"). The distinction between the fabulous and the pedestrian is undermined by the continuity of the sections, the latter transmuting the quotidian, generalized, third-person materials of the former into first-person particulars. Each examines from a different formal perspective the same set of domestic givens: marriage, children, travel, domicile, composition.

Even if I sometimes weary of a poetics so relentlessly focused on the self (especially one blessed beyond measure with absolutely minor problems, weighed on a global scale), "The Pedestrians" is a strong, assured, brilliant collection. And it's not as if Zucker is naive about her "little flicker-self trumped up somehow." Her clean, tempered prose style is an ideal delivery system for her weaponized observations. Salt crystals glitter "like drugs or a geode's innards"; "when the radio with the human genome played Phil Collins it was 1985 bar mitzvah season all over again."

In "Ocean," a woman (obviously a proxy for Zucker) on vacation with her family daily watches "the UPS truck come toward her up the road, make a three-point turn into the driveway before hers, and pull away," a banal tableau strangely charged with disappointment. A few pages later, she tries to tell her husband "her feelings about the mail truck": "'It seems so sad,' she said. 'When it turns around —'" But he's in the middle of a self-pitying rant and snarls at her, and she shuts down, stung.

It's hard to say why this is so affecting (and why it isn't more annoying). Is it that, although it seems quirky to have "feelings about the mail truck," we recognize such associative thinking from our own inner lives? Is it the specificity with which Zucker nails the pettiness of the offenses, and the triviality of the occasions, that can spark sky-high conflagrations in a marriage? It's rare to come across such self-awareness, such meticulous selection, in contemporary poetry. The only poets I can think of whose eye for precise domestic detail rivals Zucker's are Robyn Schiff and Louise Glück.

The poems of the second section are less restrained. Whereas the "fables" field "too much emotional chaos" with composure, the poems find chaos in their very form, although the messy sprawl of "Museum of Accidents" has been contained. Here, Zucker is "a podcast of dharma talks," a post-contemporary, "woefully feminine" Frank O'Hara who worries about day care and thrills to her son's playing Pink Floyd on his electric guitar.

There are also lucid forays into pruned tercets that more gravely channel the poet's bedlam ("scrub brush only looks soft") and some dream poems that remind me why I hate dream poems. My favorite poem might be the first of a series of "Real Poems," a short, sharp number:

Woke up. First big snow making

a new light — said that

before. Can't write — children —

said that. Get up:

food, oxygen. Seen snow before.

This has Issa's wit and terseness, compressing the enormity of poetic concern onto a refrigerator magnet. Zucker's not interested in making readers see anything "as if for the first time." She's here to remind us how much there is to see in what we've seen before.

Michael Robbins is the author of the poetry collections "Alien vs. Predator" and "The Second Sex" as well as a forthcoming book of criticism, "Equipment for Living."